


Rewind

by Memelock



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, there is also the BAREST like literal feather-light touch of felix/sylvain what are you gonna do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-10-01 22:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20422331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Memelock/pseuds/Memelock
Summary: Five times she has to use divine pulse, and one time she can’t.





	Rewind

**Author's Note:**

> I… haven’t actually finished the game. So be cool. And make sure you brush your teeth after this one, because boy is it sweet.

The first time she used it on her own, it was for Hilda. Of course it was — as often as the girl complained about training or cleaning, she was always one of the first to rush in swinging, regardless of her ability to defend herself. She looked up just in time to catch a streak of pink falling towards the ground, and before she had even made a decision, time stopped. Like in the village when she’d seen Sothis for the first time, everything froze around her, swords and axes mid-arc, arrows hanging in the air like the branches of an ominous forest.

She ran to Hilda where she lay, limp and pale with a mortal wound in her torso, weaving between the gleaming hunks of metal and taut limbs to reach her. Dropping to her knees, she cradled Hilda in her arms, held in place by the reflections of fire and sunlight in her glassy eyes. Rolling her own eyes toward the heavens in a moment of mindless grief, she caught a glimpse of Claude across the field and felt her heart squeeze even tighter at the thought of him seeing this, dealing with the ramifications. Hilda and Claude were always together, scheming and bickering and laughing, never one without the other. The thought of the usually cheery leader of the Golden Deer wandering Garreg Mach alone and in silence dropped a stone into her stomach.

The decision was already made; with a wave of her hand, the clock turned back. Hilda rose again, wound closing as she blurred through space to where she’d been looking hard at the mage headed her way, but this time the professor shouted to Lysithea and she and Hilda shouted as he was felled by fire. Sure, after the battle she had to cut conversation with her excited students short to fall to her knees and retch on her own in an isolated gravel pit of the quarry they had fought in, struggling to keep from passing out, but the moment she returned to the monastery and heard Claude and Hilda’s laughter echoing through the halls, the waves of dizziness seemed to suddenly ease.

* * *

The first time she used it with intentionality, rather than as a reaction to tragedy, was during another battle. Time was short, each movement was precious, and yet she’d directed Ignatz to waste time opening up a chest that ended up only containing a duplicative iron lance. Something about the disappointment on his face as he held it up for her to see from across the field made her lift her hand and, with a wave, freeze time. She studied the battlefield, Ignatz still looking somewhat crestfallen where he was paused in the midst of quickly clipping the lance to his belt to deal with later.

She retraced his steps, rewinding and reconsidering the action until she thought she’d resolved the situation. Claude was on his own a few steps away from Ignatz, and sure he could handle the pegasus riders he was facing on his own without trouble, but thinking of Ignatz’ excited reactions each time he contributed in battle put a slight smile on her face, even in the midst of the skirmish.

As time started again, she pointed Ignatz toward Claude and turned away to deal with bandits of her own. She didn’t have to look back to picture the younger archer’s glowing eyes as she heard Claude call out in praise.

* * *

The first time she used it outside of battle, she surprised herself. She would never have expected that anything important enough to turn back time over would happen at the Garreg Mach Ball. And yet, there she was in the Goddess Tower, watching Claude’s back as he walked towards the stairs and feeling a pit in her stomach. Something was missing, something hadn’t gone right. With a wave of her hand, Claude froze and blurred back to where he had been standing next to her, praying for their ambitions to come true.

“Just promise to spare a dance for me. OK, Teach?” Claude asked, winking. Her heart was still beating just a bit faster than she was comfortable with, making her ears ring a little. Thanks to experience, she no longer felt the dizziness as strongly when the amount of time rewound was small, so her unsettlement must have been coming from something else. “I swear, so long as it’s not one of those goofy noble dances, I am a treasure on the dance floor!”

She laughed somewhat breathlessly. This was where Claude had left before, sharing one last look with her before he returned to the Ball. This was where she had felt so strongly that something else should have happened that she rewound time to replay it all over again, change the outcome. This was where she was starting to feel that maybe she was in too deep but it was too late to avoid drowning.

“Why don’t you prove it now?” she asked, trying to sound light-hearted instead of nervous. Claude raised an eyebrow, but so far he didn’t seem uncomfortable. He was still playing along, always willing to listen to what she said, always happy to go along with a new idea. “You said earlier that you didn’t like crowds, or the noble dances — I’d like a little more time away from everything, we can hear the music in the Tower well enough.” She extended her hand, mimicking the gesture she’d seen the Alliance heir do so many times, still hoping she was coming across as casual enough. “I’ll give you that dance right here.”

Claude’s eyebrow was still raised, but his eyes were soft in the glow of the torches that lit the rim of the tower’s roof. Slowly, and with a kind of careful seriousness that she didn’t often see from him, he reached out to take her outstretched hand. His fingers were warm and strong as they wrapped around hers, gentle in spite of the rough calluses that speckled them from countless hours of holding his bow. His other hand reached for her waist, pulling her a little closer as she reached up with her free hand to settle on his shoulder. She could feel more warmth coming from his body, the kind that a cheerful fire pours into a dreary room. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the same kind of nervous she was, even though he didn’t show it nearly as much as she felt she did.

Slowly and with a little clumsiness, Claude started to move them as the sound of a new song from the musicians drifted up from the ball. He held her gaze, unusually quiet. She wondered for a moment if she’d made a mistake, but she could also feel his hand on her waist drawing her in, little by little, as they spun.

“So, Teach,” he said after a moment, and as always her heart warmed at the nickname, “I’ve been dying to ask this for at _least_ five minutes now, ever since you mentioned it. What kind of ambitions do you have?”

She chuckled. “I should be asking you that,” she retorted, finding it a little easier to keep her voice light now that it felt more like they were having a conversation and less like they were crossing a line that no Divine Pulse could retreat from. “I’m surprised to find that one of my least diligent students thinks of anything but the next ‘mild poison’ he could slip Lysithea to give her a rash.”

Claude rolled his eyes. “Come on, she needs to come down a peg or two and join the rest of the house,” he said. “And you of all people should know I have a little more depth than that.” His voice was just reproachful enough to make her blush, which seemed to startle him a bit. “I’m only joking, of course,” he continued, backtracking to put her back at ease. “I know you were, too. I just mean that… well, we’ve had our share of serious conversations. There’s more to me than my roguish charm and good looks.”

She laughed, again. When was the last time she’d laughed this much?

He seemed to notice too, because he grinned. “It seems like you’re having a little more fun at this ball than you let on, Teach,” he teased. “I haven’t really seen you laugh like that… well, ever. But don’t think it will get you out of sharing your ambition with me! I won’t give up that easily. Here, I’ll even share some of mine first to make you feel more comfortable.”

“Sounds like you have a lot of goals.”

Claude nodded. “As much as Lorenz hounds me about it, he’s right — I have a lot of work to do if I want to become the best leader for the Alliance. I need to be stronger, more strategic, more thoughtful. My goal is to be the kind of person that the lords of the Alliance can follow, and that the people can look up to and trust.”

“The Deer already feel that way for you, you know,” she said. “Hilda sees you as a friend and ally. Ignatz admires your skill as an archer and benefits from your mentorship. Marianne has started to find her way thanks in large part to the support of the Deer, who follow your lead. Raphael and Leonie have a lot of respect for your strategy in battle, even Lysithea sees you’re a talented fighter. And I…” A lump formed in her throat. She swallowed, hard.

Claude frowned as her voice trailed off. “Aww, come on Teach, don’t tell me I’ve made all those strides with the other students only to let me know I’ve got a long way to go before I can impress you. Another goal I have, by the way,” he added, and while she felt that this normally would have been accompanied by a trademark Claude wink, it wasn’t. The beginning of another song floated to them on the night breeze, but neither of them moved to break apart.

“Nothing like that,” she said, steeling herself and speaking deliberately. “Quite the opposite, in fact. I was going to say… I have had a lot of surprising things happen to me in the past year. I never would have expected to leave the mercenaries and become a professor, of all things. I never would have expected I would actually like teaching. I certainly never would have expected I would be so bound up with the Church of Seiros, the monastery, and the Knights since I had never even heard of them before I came here. But… maybe what I expected the least was that the person I had saved from bandits in Remire Village would come to be someone I respect so much — not only as an ally, or the head of his house, but also… as a friend.”

Another moment of silence. Claude had dropped eye contact with her as her monologue went on, cheeks reddening a little, expression serious, but he met her gaze again as she finished. “I… I didn’t know you thought so highly of Dimitri,” he said, trying and failing to break the tension with a joke. She smiled but didn’t laugh. They were very close now. The hand on her waist had been pulling her tighter and tighter as she’d spoken, and just as it had drifted to the small of her back hers had snaked gradually from his shoulder to the back of his neck. “Teach, I…”

“Where’s Claude?”

The voice of one of the students came from somewhere downstairs, although she couldn’t tell whose it was. Both startled, she and Claude stepped away from each other as though burned, Claude rubbing the back of his neck with some embarrassment. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Well, I guess it’s about time our break is over,” she said. “Back to the crowds.”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “There’s no ‘our’ about it, Teach. I don’t hear them calling for you. Listen, why don’t I head down first, ahead of you, and settle down whoever is looking for me. You can follow a little later when the heat is off.”

“I’ll owe you one,” she said, smiling ruefully. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me tonight.”

“Exhausted after working with the Deer for so many months, I have no doubt,” Claude replied. He gave her a wink and a goofy salute, and then headed toward the door. He only got far enough for her to picture the imprint of the previous iteration of this moment, abbreviated and unfulfilled, before he stopped short and turned back. “One more thing, Teach. You never told me — what is your ambition? Tell me that and we can call it even.”

She sighed. “What’s the best word for you, Claude? Incorrigible? No — maybe stubborn, since I know you won’t let me hear the end of it until I tell you.” She shook her head. The strange feeling in the pit of her stomach was back. “Like I said before, my life has been… surprising. Another word might be ‘unstable’. Jeralt has been a good father to me, but he hasn’t exactly set me on a path. I moved often as a child, never in one place until I came to the monastery. I trained as a mercenary because I didn’t know what else to do, and just as I was finding my footing there I was invited here. I came because I hadn’t really found a goal in life yet, and I still don’t know if I’m meant to do this or something else entirely. My ambition is… is to find somewhere I belong, somewhere I can work hard and grow strong and… well, be happy. Sorry,” she said, blushing again and hanging her head. “I’ve spoken too much, and you’ve got to get back.”

Claude was almost staring at her, certainly examining her, thoughtful. Then he grinned, patented Claude warmth breaking out like the sun from behind the clouds. “Not at all, Teach. You belong right here.” And with that, he disappeared down the increasingly noisy stairs, leaving her alone atop the tower, surprisingly bolstered against the increasingly chilly night breeze.

* * *

The first time she used it for someone outside of the Leicester Alliance, it was for Felix. Felix, difficult and talented, rarely seen outside the training grounds but also an unquestionably gifted swordsman. So when she turned back the clock to map and re-map their conversations, learning about him and what he needed, it was for Felix. But it was also for Sylvain.

Sylvain had sought her out early on, asking to join the Golden Deer in a transparent attempt to get closer to her. While she was uncomfortable, as most of the female students were, with Sylvain’s overt flirting, he was undoubtedly a strong warrior. She thought too that somewhere beneath the red mop of hair was a good heart. So she accepted, and Sylvain had blended right in with the group, taking their ribbing with surprising good nature and even eventually laying off his lascivious behavior with her to some extent. But she’d noticed that during the week he’d started to spend a lot more time in the training grounds, time that she often wished he would spend in the classroom filling his head with knowledge of something other than how to talk with women.

Even after Ingrid’s initial disappointed lecturing died down and she came to be at peace with Sylvain’s defection to the Deer, she noticed he still seemed to seek Felix out. From what she could glean, the three of them had grown up together, but Felix and Sylvain closer together while Ingrid’s father tried to keep her on a path to being a marriage-worthy noble lady. After Sylvain had been forced to kill Miklan, transformed as he was by the Relic into a beast, he pulled even more toward Felix, seeking comfort and understanding from someone else who had lost a brother. The circumstances were different of course — Felix hadn’t been at the tragedy of Duscur, and certainly hadn’t been the one to strike Glenn down — but both now had to wrestle with the pain and guilt of losing a complicated relationship.

This time together was all well and good on the weekends, when even she couldn’t compel Sylvain to study or train and he was free to spend all his time in the Blue Lions’ classroom. But during the week she noticed he was distant in lectures, laughing less loudly with Claude, trading fewer good-natured snipes with Lorenz, and even flirting a little less often with Hilda. Even though Sylvain hadn’t been one of her original students, she’d grown fond of him, not to speak of how she’d grown to respect his ability in battle, and seeing his usually unflappable aspect grow somber and distant both wrung her heart and concerned her strategically. She had to recruit Felix.

She knew it would be challenging but she had underestimated how difficult it would be to break down the walls Felix seemed to always be building back up. She could sense a part of him that was equally drawn to and missing Sylvain, but his stubbornness apparently would not let him relent so easily. She tried cajoling, firmness, impressing him with her swordsmanship on the training grounds, but he remained firmly at arms’ length.

In the end, it was Claude. How did it always come back to him.

She dropped to sit on the edge of the pit, exhausted after another grueling round of sword training. Sylvain had agreed to spar with her, not outright saying it but clearly understanding and appreciating her intent. Before he’d left at the end of their session, he’d thanked her — no superficial flirting or questions about which of the Deer girls liked him the best, just gratitude. It had given her the strength to do another bout with one of the training dummies, alone with her thoughts.

“Professor?” She almost jumped, turning to see she had not been as lonely as she thought. There was Felix, approaching from a corner of the room, clearly having been there for a while. “May I… sit with you for a moment?”

She had turned back time at countless moments before, adjusting pieces of her conversations with him, giving him a different gift after the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, over and over again trying and failing to interest him. She couldn’t picture a better opening than this. “Of course, Felix. How long have you been here?”

“A while.” He perched next to her, moving like water, the way he always did. “You’re very skilled with the blade, probably skilled enough to beat me in a fight.”

She raised her brow. “That means a lot coming from you,” she said. “Hopefully it never comes to that.”

He nodded. “I didn’t come to talk about your sword fighting. I came to ask about… about Claude, the head of the Golden Deer.”

“What could you possibly want to know about Claude? I thought the Blue Lions had nothing but disdain for him.” She didn’t like speaking so ill of the Deer’s de facto leader but she knew it was true — and she knew Felix would appreciate it. 

He clearly did, as he nodded again. “Likely with good reason,” he said, voice hard and flat as usual. “But since Sylvain has joined your house… he seems to be getting on well with him.”

It was her turn to nod. “They are similar in some ways.”

“How similar?” he shot back, holding her gaze, intense as ever.

She considered him thoughtfully. This could easily turn into another point where she’d have to turn back time, hoping against hope that things would be different and that she would somehow disarm one of the most combative students in the monastery. “Felix, I think you should join our house.”

He looked startled, taken aback, and truthfully she was surprised at herself. Nevertheless, she sensed an advantage and pressed on. “Claude and Sylvain are similar in superficial ways. They’ve known each other for months, not years the way you have, and Claude can’t imagine the kind of loss you’ve each gone through. If you join the Golden Deer, you and Sylvain can train and learn together, you can help each other the way you did before with the Lions. Furthermore, and I think you already know this, I would be honored to teach you in my class, especially now that you accept that I’m capable of besting you on the battlefield.”

Felix had narrowed his eyes at her last sentence, but he had been listening. They sat unspeaking for a moment, the only sound the noises of life outside the doors of the training grounds. For a moment she was afraid she had said something worth rewinding time and just forgetting this conversation had happened, afraid she had pushed him too hard. “Fine,” he said, and she let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, “but don’t expect me to be as lackadaisical a student as the other simpletons you’re teaching right now.”

“Does that include Sylvain?”

“It _especially _includes Sylvain.”

Her immediate reward for months of hard work, before reaping the benefits of deploying Felix into battle, was twofold. The first moment came the morning after her conversation with Felix, a rainy day that forced her to walk under the stone awnings as she made her way to the market for yet another visit to the blacksmith. The tall, red-headed person walking in front of her was clearly Sylvain. He stopped to peer in from the doorway of the Blue Lions’ classroom, so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t notice her behind him. Whatever he was looking for, it was clearly not there; his face fell, and he continued walking, more slowly than before. She continued behind him, not wanting to alert him to her presence, unsure of why she was so interested. He had almost passed the Golden Deer classroom when someone called his name. He looked up, eyes darting for a moment, before they landed on what they sought. He lit up as he called out “Hey, what are you doing here?” and walked into her classroom with more enthusiasm than she’d ever seen from him.

The second moment came the next time she had lecture. She was organizing her notes at her desk, watching students trickle in. Felix was already sitting in the back for the moment, though she had no doubt that once Sylvain arrived he would drag the younger boy to wherever he would be sitting. Claude strolled in the door, humming loudly enough to make her wonder why he was so cheerful so early in the morning — on a day when he had to be in class, no less. She watched, hopefully covertly, as he passed Felix, waving casually to the form of what he had to have assumed was one of his classmates. Then he paused, hand frozen in its descent from the air, as he recognized who it actually was. He glanced to the front of the classroom where she sat, and she hoped the quick duck of her head to look back to her papers had gone unnoticed. When she looked back up again a moment later, Claude was just leaning down to plant an elbow on her desk.

“Boy, you really can charm anyone, huh Teach?”

* * *

The first, and only, time she had to use it over and over again, wrenching time back and forcing it to to bend to her will, was during the last fight. She was sparring with Edelgard, flanked by Felix and Lorenz, Hilda behind Edelgard with tears streaming down her face as she struck out at her former schoolmate — now nearly unrecognizable. Imperial soldiers poured in, pulling her allies away from her by turns and forcing all her attention onto the Flame Emperor, dodging, striking, feinting, remembering all her time as a mercenary. The memory of her father, face draining of color as Monica twisted her dagger in his side, burned behind her eyes and renewed her energy with anger.

And then she heard Raphael scream. Unflappable, affable Raphael, who found some level of satisfaction in being able to take down his enemies with his bare hands — the sound was so foreign and so wrong that she felt her blood instantly run cold. To her left Lorenz froze, face a mask of shock and for a moment she thought he’d been hurt. But then she heard the impact.

Time had already stopped before she finished whirling around. Above the battlefield, as ever, was Claude’s wyvern — but they were riderless. She shook as her eyes traveled slowly to the ground below, unwilling to accept the truth she was afraid to see. There, not ten feet to the right of her, mid-gasp on a throatful of his own blood and body broken clearly beyond repair, was Claude. She fell to her knees, dragged by an anvil dropping into her stomach, screaming a wordless howl to the unhearing ears of those around her. Claude, always by her side; Claude who’d waited five years to keep a promise to a woman who had vanished from the face of the earth; Claude who was always playing it fast and loose with his own safety, who didn’t have to fear the lure of his Relic’s Crest Stone because his heart was purely golden; Claude, who would now have to find out once and for all the answers to his questions about the gods of Fodlan.

No. She rewound enough to get him out of the way of the archers — Raphael could deal with them, handily even, what the hell was he doing in their range anyway?

Dodge, strike, feint, scream, impact. Wave of the hand, howl, rewind and do over, ignore the rising nausea and dizziness. Fiery glow reflected brightly in Edelgard’s eyes, Hilda’s salt-spotted cheeks, Felix’s father and her father killed by the Imperial Army, scream, impact. Freeze, vomit, anvil, maybe Raphael was drawing Claude’s attention so sending him into the thicket where the axe users would pose minimal threat to either of them.

Tears streaking down her face for what her allies might perceive as no reason, she waved her hand again to try again. Clang of sword on axe, Edelgard, Raphael, impact… this time it was Hilda that froze, arm raised to strike at the Flame Emperor. Stop time, kneel and vomit as the dizziness started to rise to the level of pain — she’d never tried, never needed, to do this so many times in a row. Wiping her mouth, she staggered to her feet, surveying the battlefield. She wasn’t going to be capable of fighting Edelgard for much longer at this rate. This time when she rewound, she stuck close to Sylvain as she approached the Flame Emperor, knowing he’d be able to absorb more damage while mounted, sick with herself for putting someone else at risk to the mad queen. Felix fought twice as hard, Hilda’s face was raw with tears she didn’t know she’d cried four different times, and now that she had a moment to glance across the field and away from Edelgard, she saw the problem.

She _was_ the problem.

Divine Pulse. One more time, falling to her knees, retching up nothing for there was nothing left, she wiped her mouth and considered her options. Claude was coming for her, he always had been no matter how she moved the other pieces around the board. He was coming recklessly, the way Lorenz always said he was. The frozen battleground was a minefield for her headstrong ally… her stubborn partner. She took a few breaths, trying to force herself to accept reality: these were not her students anymore, needing to be protected. These were hurt people, adults who had lost friends, family, and inheritances to Edelgard and the war with the Church. They were angry, they were comprehending of what was at stake, and worst of all, they were in danger if she continued to put them at risk with her own unexpected vulnerability.

She rose to her feet, stumbling only a little despite the slowly building aura threatening to burst through her skull and blind her, and carefully she fell back, dragging time with her. Reversed impact, re-mounted wyvern, recreated formation. She waved her hand, one last time, and blinked back another wave of sickening pain.

“Cavalry, to the emperor! Ignatz and Raphael to the riders, Lysithea and Marianne with Felix to the archers. Claude, you’re with me.”

She was far from top form, but the Imperial soldiers they faced were no match for her and Claude fighting in sync — in fact, as though she’d transferred some of her power to him, he was going above and beyond. As though he knew she needed it. 

It was over as suddenly as it had begun. Leonie had struck the death blow, Sylvain holding Edelgard’s attention as she furiously drove the spear into her heart from behind, finally releasing all the grief and anger she’d held onto for the last five years in one long shriek. Everyone held their breath for a moment, and then with a coldness that made her heart hurt, Leonie shook the emperor’s lifeless body to the ground. The few soldiers left aside ran, taking advantage of the shock that had fallen over the rest of the group, and she dimly heard Claude’s commanding voice send Sylvain, Hilda and Lorenz after them. Everyone else seemed at least partially frozen in place, unable to understand yet how it was possible that they had achieved the goal they’d fought for over the past year. Then Lysithea fell into Marianne’s arms, breaking the spell, sobbing as if to make up for the rest of the Deer who weren’t ready to yet, and Felix embraced both of them with a tenderness she’d thought him incapable of. Raphael and Ignatz were still staring at each other, then at Edelgard bleeding at the erstwhile epicenter of the conflict, then back at each other in disbelief. Leonie sat silently crying on the back of her horse.

And as Claude was landing and dismounting his wyvern, as the other riders chased down the straggling Imperial units, she was staggering off to a stream she’d seen a ways away from the clearing they were in, desperate to clean the residue of bile and fear from her mouth. She did wash away the taste eventually, rinsing and spitting repeatedly, beating back the splitting ache in her temples and behind her eyes. Now that she was sitting beside the water she wasn’t sure she had the strength to get up. This weakness was one of the reasons she didn’t even try to turn around when she heard footsteps behind her.

He had come for her. He would always be coming for her — what had she said before? _Recklessly._ Claude sat down next to her without waiting for her to ask or look at him. Very slowly, and very gently, and without saying a word, he put his arm around her. Too tired to resist, and not sure she wanted to if she could, she leaned against him, grateful for the support to her throbbing head.

“Teach,” he said at last, barely audible above the running water, “what happened back there?”

She debated lying. She debated avoiding the question, giving a purposefully vague or confusing answer. But she had a feeling she would never need to do it again. “Claude.” A pause, maybe to summon her strength, maybe to let him prepare himself based on the seriousness of her tone. “You died back there. Over and over again you died. I had to stop that from happening. I couldn’t…” The sound of his body hitting the ground, breaking, over and over again, rang in her ears and she winced. He squeezed her a little tighter. She was glad she wasn’t looking at him.

“What do you mean you had to stop it?” he asked. “How?”

“It’s… it’s something that came from fusing with Sothis. Something I have — maybe _had_ — that let me rewind time and undo what was done. Make a different choice, get a different outcome.”

He was silent. She didn’t feel inclined to push him for a response, not unaware of the gravity of what she had shared, and truthfully the quiet and the rhythm of the water and the warmth and solidity of his body next to hers were comforting. “You would do that for me?”

At this she did turn to look up at him, raising her head with some difficulty, dumbfounded. “What?”

He did not return her gaze, staring instead at the river, arm over her shoulders unmoving although it forced her neck at an uncomfortable angle as she faced him. “Watching you fight… it’s clear that you doing that took a lot out of you. And yet you did it for me.” There was another pause, her gaze unbroken. Then he spoke again. “How many times?”

“Five,” she replied. His face froze. “I’ve never done it that many times at once before, never for something so… drastic. Never to make so many changes.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.” Claude’s voice was hard-shelled, tender underneath with a kind of raw pain that cut deeper than the Divine Pulse had. “You put yourself in danger, I — we could have lost you, we could have lost everything.”

“We almost did!” she replied, wincing again as the loudness of her voice bounced around the inside of her skull. “We could have lost the leader of the Leicester Alliance, the only person with the vision to reunify Fodlan and make it a place worth living in again. Claude, you… you _died_. Over and over you died.” She was crying again, too exhausted and in pain to be humiliated as tears burned her cheeks. She leaned against him again, relieved to feel his arm tighten around her again, pulling her close instead of pushing her away.

It passed quickly. She was too weary to keep crying for long, and Claude was there next to her, heart beating somewhere in there, golden as ever. The pain in her head was fading to a duller throbbing. They were in maybe the longest silence between them in the entire time they’d known each other, but it felt right. Everything was settling, Fodlan was holding its breath around them in the wake of everything they had done.

“Was I being a fool?” His voice was small again, maybe even sheepish, maybe something softer. It was one of those Claude half-jokes that could pass as teasing or serious depending on how the recipient received them. No wink.

“Yes,” she replied simply. “Yes, you were. I mean, you flew right into a glut of archers when Raphael had them handled, all because you were trying…” She suddenly felt self-conscious, unable or unwilling or just ashamed to finish her sentence.

He nodded above her, jaw brushing the top of her head as he did so. “I had a feeling,” he said. “When you told me I was to stay with you during the battle, I… I felt so strongly that we had to protect each other, so strongly that I had to be near you… well, I knew I must have been foolish.”

She sat with that for a moment. The stream babbled. A bird sung, the first she had heard in a while. Her head ached but her body felt warm and pleasantly weighty under his arm, still pressing her against him.

“Teach?” he said, and his free hand pressed lightly against her chin, tilting her head up to look at him. The nickname still made her heart swell, but now it also broke her arms out in gooseflesh. She almost shivered. Their faces were very close. “Never do that for me again.”

His eyes were earnest, molten sea glass in the fading light of day, but they closed as he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers. The pounding in her head slowly faded away.

* * *

The first time she tried to use it and failed was in the middle of the night. The shattering bones from the nightmare woke her, sitting up in her bed and waving her hand the way she had so many times before on instinct. Turn back, wipe away the fear and the gut-wrenching emptiness.

Nothing happened. No slowing to a stop, no subsequent rewind of the pain her brain had conjured from an image she’d never actually seen — Claude falling from the wyvern — and no cooling of the hot knife twisted in her stomach at the reminder of an aftermath she’d never forget. She brushed away startled tears from her face in the dark, alone. Too alone. Alone forever, maybe.

_No_, she reminded herself, trying to breathe deeply, trying to still her pounding heart. Claude was alive. He was alive, and they were both here in the monastery, her on the third floor in the room Rhea had left her, him somewhere humbly sleeping in the same room he’d had as a student. They had been working together for weeks now on plans for the reunification of Fodlan and the reformation of the Church of Seiros into something the people could trust and find comfort in again. Busy, thrown together often with and without the others in their ally group as they worked to eradicate the last of the Empire and Those Who Slither in the Dark, she and Claude had not spoken about the aftermath of the battle with Edelgard. They had returned from the creek bank to the rest of the Alliance and allowed themselves to be swept up into the arms of their friends, overwhelmed and broken. She had spent time by turns with Marianne, Hilda, and Ignatz as each of them knocked on her door in the night, crying and unable to speak. She was happy to comfort them — and she had a feeling, somewhere else in the dormitories, Claude was probably doing the same for someone else. He drew people in that way. Even Lorenz had become practically soft-hearted in his praise for the new leader of the Leicester Alliance.

And yet they hadn’t needed each other. Not until now.

She stood up, swallowing her pride. The scene was playing and replaying in her mind, making her efforts to calm herself futile. She had to see him, to prove he was real and alive to the increasingly unsettled feeling in her stomach. Throwing on a somewhat ratty but warm sweater over her nightshirt, she threw open her door and was shocked to see someone standing there. Not just shocked _that_ someone was standing there — it certainly wasn’t unheard of as the Alliance started to realize their trauma — it was who it was.

“Claude.” Half gasp, half exhale. In and out. He looked tired, even a little drawn, in his loose tunic and what looked like old leggings. The moonlight filtered in through the windows in the hall outside her room, making his clothing look filmy and his skin luminous. Her heart pounded.

“Hey Teach,” he said, voice raspy as though he too had just been roused from sleep. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry to scare you — I promise I was going to knock, but I just… I was working up to it.”

“No apology necessary.” She wrapped her arms more tightly around her against the chilly air and coldness of the stone floor. “Is everything all right?”

He considered her for a moment. “Well… no. But I’m guessing since you’re up too you know that already, huh?”

She felt soft and vulnerable in front of him, the very evidence she’d been looking for. She nodded, stepping aside and gesturing him in. He complied, moving past her as she shut the door behind him to settle on a sofa that had once been Rhea’s. Like everything she had owned, it was very opulent and very uncomfortable. She perched next to him on it, slightly out of reach just in case, trying not to lean against the back of the hulking leather piece, which had awful hard decorative buttons sewn into it. 

Claude spoke first, braver than she was as usual, fiddling with a loose thread and studiously not looking at her. “I had a conversation with Hilda earlier.”

She was taken aback by this. She hadn’t known what to expect when she’d invited him in, but it hadn’t been that. “Hilda?”

He nodded. “I know you’ve talked to her too; you know she’s been struggling with what she saw, what she had to do, against Edelgard. I’ve just been trying to cheer her up and maybe help take her mind off things. You know how Hilda and I have always been, we get along. We understand each other.” Her turn to nod. “Well, today we were talking and she brought up that she still feels nervous because of… of you. She said you seem different since the last battle with the Empire. I waved her concerns off with my trademark Von Riegan charm —” even at the most serious of times, he can’t help but joke “ — but it got me thinking. Thinking about how inconsiderate I’ve been toward you.” He still isn’t looking at her. “You sacrificed so much for me. You gave up a piece of your magic to save my life, and instead of showing you my gratitude and giving you the space to heal… I just kept going. I kept plowing on toward my ambitions without thinking of the most important people around me.” He stuttered a little over _people_, like he meant a different word, like he wanted her to hear something only she would understand. “I’m sorry, Teach. And thank you.”

“Do you want to know how it happened?” she asked softly. Silence. “You fell. You fell from that damned wyvern you always fly too high and too quickly. There was nothing to catch you.” She paused, wondering if she’d gone too far, but he didn’t react. “You may not remember, but… I do. I remember it well enough to wake up in the middle of the night, seeing it again, trying to set back the clock but unable to. I saw it happen five times, five times too many and enough to make me feel like any moment now I’ll wake up at that will be real and everything will be taken away from me.”

She wasn’t looking at him anymore, so she jumped a little when his far warmer fingers brushed against hers. He hesitated when she started, but strengthened his grip when her eyes darted up to meet his. He could almost certainly feel her pulse beating rapidly against his skin — she certainly could. In the moonlight his eyes looked darker than usual, more adult. Resemblance to her cheery student of the past had been ground down by time and loss. 

“I, uh… I didn’t actually come to talk about Hilda,” he admitted. “And even though I did come to thank you, and apologize to you, I also had a selfish reason for coming here.” She didn’t speak, couldn’t speak maybe. His face in the moonlight suddenly felt like a gravitational pull, like the most important thing in the world. “Teach, I’ve been thinking about the fight with Edelgard — I mean, of course I have, everyone has been. But I mean… I’ve been thinking about everything that happened with… with us. Truthfully I’m a little ashamed of how afraid I’ve been to talk about this with you, my friend, someone who I could always share with.”

“It must be important.” She had to swallow an invisible, shaking lump to get the words out. His hand was almost clutching hers now and she let herself clutch back.

Claude nodded. “You could say that.” He took a very deep breath. “Okay. Like it or not, Teach, we’re tied to each other. Some way, somehow our fates are bound up together. I couldn’t survive that battle without you, you couldn’t continue the fight without me. I gave up my life for you, you put your life in danger and destroyed your most powerful magic… for me.” The disbelief in his voice hurt her, as though he were still the little boy resigned to being dragged behind a horse or being an outsider. “Say something, Teach, tell me if I’m being foolish again.”

She couldn’t speak yet, but she shook her head. Tentatively, like a wounded animal in her vulnerability, she moved closer to him, anchored by his death grip. “Maybe for the first time you are not being foolish.” He grinned weakly, relieved, still afraid. “You’re right. Our dreams, the ones we talked about on the Goddess Tower five years ago, are intertwined. You talk about the things I’ve done for you, and I want to be your partner in healing Fodlan and reforming the church, but Claude —” she choked on the word, throttled by the sudden overwhelming force of all the things she hadn’t allowed herself to feel while the war raged on — “you gave me something to believe in, something to work for… somewhere to belong.”

They were both silent for a moment, breathing heavily, shocked by the force of her words. He was looking right at her, right into her, and for the first time ever she felt like she was fully looking back. “Then be here.” His voice was soft, his face shone in the moonlight, and she brought her free hand up to rest against it, Claude-warm and a little rough. She felt the bones of his jaw moving under her skin, under his. “Be with me, be my partner, my friend, my…”

He didn’t have to find the word — what word was there? She pressed her lips to his, soft but sure. When she moved to pull back, to gauge the reaction, his unencumbered hand flew to the back of her head, pinning her close to him. Her eyes opened, meeting his, and then they were both smiling, lips meeting again with the hunger of five empty years, separating for breath, laughing, melting into each other, nightmares fading for now into a time that didn’t exist anymore.

Before, she might have waved her hand at one of many moments, freezing and rewinding and micromanaging outcomes until she felt she had what she wanted, what she needed, everything perfect. But it was amazing how, when there was no other option, Claude’s schemes always seemed to go off without a hitch.

**Author's Note:**

> So there’s the thing I thought would be like 2000 words tops. Also can you tell my backseat driving ass got Sylvain and Felix to join the Deer? It took forever.


End file.
